3/30/2010 @ 6:00PM

World's Youngest iPhone App Developer?

There are probably tens of thousands of iPhone application developers out there, but a rare few are as young as 14-year-old Pierce Freeman, a Bay Area eighth grader. Freeman recently saw
Apple
approve his first app, dubbed CardShare, and talked to Forbes’s Taylor Buley about the process.

What does your CardShare application do?

Pierce Freeman: It allows you to exchange a virtual business card without any paper. You can include both personal and social networking details such as your name, phone number, e-mail address, and Twitter or Facebook details.

Twitter and Facebook. That’s probably more important to a 14-year-old like yourself than, say, the business card aspects of it.

Maybe. But since I run an animal photography business and do Web design, I will be using my app quite a bit, as well as the regular details.

How many lines of code actually went into this application?

On both the server end and the client end, CardShare took over 11,000 lines of code.

What kind of software are we talking about? Is this
Adobe
software or
Apple
software? What did you use to create this?

Despite the Flash anxiety that’s surrounding the iPad and the iPhone, I used both Adobe and Apple’s software to create this. More specifically, the graphics in the application were done in Adobe Photoshop. In order to scale down and scale up the icon, I did it in Adobe Illustrator. Then all of the programming was done in Apple’s Xcode or Espresso, which is a Web design utility.

I did this whole thing primarily out of school. I talked to some of my friends and teachers briefly about how they would use an app like this. But most of the sketching and everything was done at home, after school or on the weekends.

Presumably they don’t have an iPhone application development class at your school? Or at least not yet?

Not yet. I may start that one.

Have you taken any formal programming classes?

No, I haven’t. I’m completely self-taught.

So when I was your age, we used to program on
Texas Instruments
TI-83 calculators. Does anyone do that anymore?

I don’t. I think that in some high schools they do program on graphing calculators. But that is out of my level of expertise.

So where do you find other people at your level of expertise? Are there communities out there where you can find people like yourself?

I have never met another 14-, 15- or 16-year-old, even a 17- or 18-year-old who programs for the iPhone and for the Mac and then integrates this with Web services. I assume there are maybe a very select few out there, and I’m very proud to be one of them. But there’s definitely not some online forum or other discussion site where I could interact with kids. So I had most of my questions answered by the really nice people in the Mac independent software community. They guided me through the steps to create this, and I’m really appreciative for all their help.